At HP Discover in Las Vegas, HP CEO Leo Apotheker said the company will launch a public cloud ‘very soon.’

It will be a ‘public cloud service, very soon. It will be infrastructure as a service, platform services, and an open cloud market. In the hybrid world, we will supplement private clouds.’

Speaking in the keynote address to the company’s annual convention in Las Vegas, Apotheker, who became hp CEO in November 2010 then introduced Verizon and hailed the telecoms firm as a key partner by citing Verizon’s acquisition of Terremark and its cloud platform delivered through its data centers.

Apotheker said: ‘An optimum part of leveraging the cloud is deep partnerships with for example Verizon.’

President of Terremark, Kerry Bailey said Verizon’s view of the cloud was that it was transformational for business and that it was betting big on the cloud.

Joining Apotheker on the stage, he said: We looked at enterprises buying IT differently and new IT delivery models. We deployed all hp equipment (in its data centers including those in Asia and Latin America) then took in the hp orchestration layer and linked that around Verizon’s MPLS backbone.

Terremark’s service through its data centers is called ‘Everything as a service’ said Bailey which meant that as a long time service provider it saw a trend to enterprises buying their IT as a service from ‘the network layer to the application.’

Apotheker then announced that hp was making $2bn available through HP finance to develop cloud applications for enterprise.  ‘Take the money,’ Apotheker said.

Earlier in the day hp unveiled its ecoPOD, a container based air cooled modular data center which it said would deliver a ’near perfect’PUE of 1.05.